Give a Donation and help support the Museum.
Open to the public, accessible, and always informative, the Parmer County Museum is a 501(C)3 non-profit entity. The Internal Revenue Service has approved the Museum as a tax-exempt, charitable organization. Donations made to the Parmer County Museum are tax-deductible.
We never charge entrance fees; your donations are vital to our day-to-day operations and directly support the exhibitions and programming at the Museum.
Martin Parmer
XIT Map
About Parmer County
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Martin Parmer, legislator, judge, and signer of the Texas Declaration of Independence, was born in Charlotte County, Virginia, on June 4, 1778. San Augustine County selected Parmer as one of its delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1836. At Washington-on-the-Brazos, he signed the Texas Declaration of Independence and was assigned to the committee to draft the new constitution.
Parmer died on March 2, 1850, in Jasper County. He was buried twelve miles southeast of Jasper on the A. C. Parmer survey. Later his body was moved to the State Cemetery in Austin.
Parmer County, established on August 21, 1876, was named in his honor.
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In 1876, the Texas legislature established Parmer County from lands formerly assigned to the Bexar District. No settlement occurred in the county until 1882. In January of that year, the Capitol Syndicate agreed to build a new state capitol in return for 3,000,000 acres of land in West Texas. Parmer County lay entirely within the lands granted to the Chicago syndicate for its huge XIT Ranch. For the rest of the century Parmer County remained unorganized and unpopulated, except for the XIT cowboys.
According to the United States agricultural census for 1900, the XIT (the only ranch in the area at the time) extended across 150,000 acres of Parmer County land. The census reported 13,675 cattle in the county that year.